Branding and Its Dangers and Advantages.
“When choices become vast, the only things that matter are brand names.” (Michael Eisner, CEO, Disney)….“Amazon.com will sell its fixed assets to focus on managing its brand, becoming the ‘Coca-Cola’ of the web” (Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amamzon.com).
a. Does every company need to ‘brand’ itself and its products as these quotes above suggest?
b. What added ‘dangers’/advantages are brought about by branding in a global marketplace? Supplement your answer with examples where possible.
Brands have existed since forever. In a time before fences were used in ranching to keep one's cattle separate from other people's cattle, ranch owners branded, or marked, their cattle so they could later identify their herd as their own. The value of branding in the age of globalisation and the Internet is much, much more than just creating a way to identify a product or company. Brands today spell reliability, quality and trust. It is this value that explains why all companies need to brand themselves or their products.
This essay weighs the benefits and costs of branding to reach the conclusion that branding is all pervasive and needed for all companies. It draws from consumer behaviour theory to show how branding works. It’s found that the advantages of branding are essentially the same as global branding. So the second half deals with the major disadvantages and concludes that inspite of them branding is necessary due to the highly competitive and constantly changing environment.
The American marketing association defines a brand as “a name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or groups of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors.”
According to Kotler a brand can convey up to six levels of meaning- Attributes, Benefits, Values, Culture, Personality and User. One mistake is to focus only on attributes- they can be easily copied by competitors or benefits-which can be easily topped. The
a. Does every company need to ‘brand’ itself and its products as these quotes above suggest?
b. What added ‘dangers’/advantages are brought about by branding in a global marketplace? Supplement your answer with examples where possible.
Brands have existed since forever. In a time before fences were used in ranching to keep one's cattle separate from other people's cattle, ranch owners branded, or marked, their cattle so they could later identify their herd as their own. The value of branding in the age of globalisation and the Internet is much, much more than just creating a way to identify a product or company. Brands today spell reliability, quality and trust. It is this value that explains why all companies need to brand themselves or their products.
This essay weighs the benefits and costs of branding to reach the conclusion that branding is all pervasive and needed for all companies. It draws from consumer behaviour theory to show how branding works. It’s found that the advantages of branding are essentially the same as global branding. So the second half deals with the major disadvantages and concludes that inspite of them branding is necessary due to the highly competitive and constantly changing environment.
The American marketing association defines a brand as “a name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or groups of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors.”
According to Kotler a brand can convey up to six levels of meaning- Attributes, Benefits, Values, Culture, Personality and User. One mistake is to focus only on attributes- they can be easily copied by competitors or benefits-which can be easily topped. The
References: Court, David C. ,Freeling, Anthony ,Leiter, Mark G. , Parsons, Andrew (1997) If Nike can `just do it, ' why can 't we? McKinsey Quarterly; 1997 Issue 3, p24, 11p, 1 diagram, 1 graph, 1c; Electronic Journals Consumers embrace ethical sales, costing firms £2.6bn a year, The Independent, 09 December 2003 Gomez Rafael (2003) “No Logo”, Flamingo, London Kotler Philip (1999) Lambin J.J. (2000) Market Driven Management, London; Palgrave.John Quelch The challenges of corporate branding, Corporate reputation review, Volume 5 numbers 2 and 3 Peter Farquhar (1999) Managing Brand Risk in sense, Identifying and leveraging brand equity: a 21st century approach , Article QuickLink Number: 0572 March, 2000. Sicco van Gelder (2002)